Live data from Hacker News

Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

material-shell.com

51–60 of 271 posts

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#51
post #39

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…

I recently switched to Sway because gnomes workspaces annoyed me too much. Let me choose a workspace independently on each monitor please! On i3 I was getting really bad screen tearing, even with conpton/picom otherwise I’d have just used that, but Sway/Wayland has no such problems.

Sadly a few things don’t work so well in Wayland. For example, Windows games under Proton work fine on X but not on Wayland/Xwayland (I guess since they’re not Wayland aware they can’t bypass the compositor?)

So, I too will try this project out as it looks like it may be a nice middleground where I can be productive in gnome on X.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#52
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a poor excuse given that a) mp4 support is pretty good these days and b) CSS already has responsive loading of assets. It's purely that to a man with a JS framework everything looks like a dynamic site. I highly recommend running Noscript to see how much of the Internet is broken because of this kind of nonsense.

Running Noscript doesn't show you how much of the internet is broken but instead is you purposefully breaking the internet for yourself.

You don't need Javascript for static content.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#53
post #13

I don't like this at all. Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design, and tiling should be an option. The video is too fast to allow any actual evaluation of its offerings. The big buttons in the section 'find your tasks instantaneously' are not necessary. The gnome interface sucks big time and I don't see this as improvement.

> Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design Scrolling gives users a spatial feeling (ie. "what is where in relation to something else") in contrast to just magically letting things appear without animation or transition. There are plenty of UI designs which use scrolling. Sure you can debate whether they are a success or not but I've never head of "Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design". That sounds more like a per…

This has a stacking option too. You don’t have to use tiling.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#54
post #6

With how horrible Gnome 3 is to use I guess nothing can be worse, though I'm sure just like gnome 3 it will also randomly crash every 15 minutes.

What desktop/os do you use as your daily driver?

After having tried Gnome and KDE, I switched back to XFCE last year, and I don't regret the decision.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#55
post #36

Tried it briefly, I currently use i3 on ubuntu and found it to be much much slower than that, the animations while pretty get pretty jarring once u start switching windows too often. I much prefer the i3 style of just showing a blinking cursor on switching windows. The grid layout is interesting but I found it strange that the all tabs are shown along the left side in split mode. It would be interesting to see how th…

I'm going through a distro hopping phase, so recently hopped to Fedora spins (am currently on KDE)...but had heard of regolith separately and really liked the idea. So i went to DistroTest[0] and took it for a spin, and it won me over. I still ant to finish my experiment with fedora spins, but right after, I'll be heading Regolith!

[0] https://distrotest.net/Regolith%20Linux/R1.1

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#56
post #39

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…

> As a result, I'm back in Firefox on my primary monitor (as expected) but now I have an unwanted random Firefox window that I forgot was even open on top of Teams on my secondary monitor!

The idea here is to also use the tilde while alt-tabbing. Also shift comes in handy to wheel back through the applications.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#57
post #39

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…

Doesn’t GNOME at least have a setting to change alt-tab to window- instead of app-based?

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#58
post #47

Can two windows overlap? Or are they just opened full-screen or inside a tile side-by-side? If not, then I don't like that very much. For example the calculator: I don't want it to take 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen. It's like going back into a 35 years ago pre DESQview era. Edit: nevermind. "In Material Shell windows are tiled. These means they are organised in a predictable way in which they do not overlap" . I guess I…

I can't speak about Material Shell, but on dedicated tiling WMs, you get to select a subset of apps that you want to always open in floating mode to accommodate the use case you are describing. Nonetheless, I find myself not using that at all, since in most cases the tiled view allows for optimum use of screen real-estate in my opinion. If I can't see the entirety of a window it's kind of useless to me, so i'd prefer it be on a different workspace. But of course, floating one window like your calculator while your browser and RSS feed reader are tiled on the desktop is entirely possible and probably quite common. I do, however, use a popup rofi window with a custom script as a calculator, so that does indeed float near the top of my screen.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#60
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gtk3's title bar / hamburger menu / tool bar / modal dialog hybrid thing is a great motivator for avoiding Gtk3 apps. I've been pretty successfully avoiding them since upgrading to Ubuntu 20 and discovering that horrorshow. I'm having difficulty getting different colours on active vs inactive title bars on regular apps, though. Still working on it occasionally.

Why is it a horror show? It never bothered me

It's visually cluttered, the title bar is often missing an actual title, every control on there takes longer to respond to a click because it has to wait to see if you want to move the window instead, the menu takes an extra click to open and is also really slow, the menu doesn't include keyboard shortcuts ...

The applications which have been converted are much harder to use. For example, I found dconf-editor in particular is now extremely frustrating to use, since it doesn't have a treeview - it's impossible to explore more than one recursive path simultaneously, and the mouse distance between opening a folder to see its contents and going back to its parent is now quite large. The title bar doesn't have enough space to display a long path due to it having lots of other controls in there, and ends up showing something like '/ com / ubuntu / Ab...xy / ap...ons / ap...ons', or worse, only the most nested folder name.

It's also just really ugly: cluttered, busy.

The good thing is there are no - zero - gtk3 apps that I need to use.

Post reply on HN